Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the inspiration and lessons learned from my friends and colleagues at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). If not for Stacey Schmader and Thomas Linzey, cofounders of CELDF, this book would not exist. To Thomas, our executive director, a big thank you for steering our adventure through the Scylla and Charybdis of a legal system as voracious and mindless as those mythic vortexes navigated by Odysseus.

I have fond memories and respect for our late friend and mentor, Richard Grossman, who dug deep into the mass grave where inconvenient historical truths are buried and came back with evidence of wrongdoing unimagined by the living. He told me that when he and Thomas invited me to join them, after my long years of corporate drudgery—and I accepted— I had undergone a mitzvah: in this case he meant a crucial life-changing event. Today I know what he meant.

Over the years our numbers grew, and our lonely quest became less forlorn. Gail Darrell joined us to begin community rights organizing in New Hampshire. Simple meals with her and her husband, Doug, in their Barnstead home, hearts speaking to inform our heads, gave new depth to our work. Gail was taken from us years too soon.

Mari Margil, our associate director, has become a global leader in the movement for the rights of nature. Mari has traveled the world to meet with advocates for nature’s rights. Chad Nicholson, Tish O’Dell, Kai Huschke, and Michelle Sanborn are our Pennsylvania, Ohio, Northwestern, and New Hampshire community rights organizers respectively. They are the lifeblood of this work. Educators, inspirers, friends, and confidants to the intrepid communities that have become part of the community rights movement, they are beacons of integrity, empathy, and wisdom. I am very fortunate to have them at my back.

Thanks to Lindsey, Dan, Terry, Elizabeth, Karen, and many others from our legal team, and to Shannon Biggs, founder of Movement Rights in San Francisco. She’s our California partner and longtime friend and ally.

I am grateful to Steve Piersanti at Berrett-Koehler Publishers for his encouragement and advice, and to everyone at BK for making this what I hope is a passable presentation of some far-ranging ideas. Special thanks to Shauna Shames for editorial and structural advice. Thanks particularly to David Korten for his helpful correspondences, suggestions, and generous foreword.

There are a few others who made this book possible through their patience, support, and encouragement. All my love and thanks to Kara Scott, my partner in everything. She is my confidante, advisor, friend, and ever true compass. My E.Q.

With love and appreciation, thanks to Andrew Price, my son. When I look to the future, I find inspiration in knowing there will be men like him with big hearts living in it. There are four others now part of my life who have contributed to this book with their patience and good humor: Garrett, Gabe, Gavin, and Grant. Thank you, guys!

I am also honored to thank my blood-brother Tom Mullian, a patient listener, always a cocreator and comrade in exploring ideas; without his lifelong influence I would not be who I am.

I am solely responsible for any errors or omissions. I connected the dots as certain social and historical patterns revealed themselves to me. My greatest hope is that this book will help us, even a little, to move into the future together and make it a place where we’d be proud to invite our children to live.